The Most Important Case Ever Decided by Any Court Began with a Petty Dispute Over a Patronage Job

Michael J. Glennon, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, writing in the Wilson Quarterly
(Summer 2003):

The most monumental case ever decided by any court in any country began as
a petty dispute over a patronage job. The underlying controversy quickly blossomed
into a clash between two titans of the early American republic, and it ended
with the unveiling of a new judicial doctrine that would alter the course
of American history and spread around the world to protect the liberty of
hundreds of millions of people.

The doctrine was judicial reviewthe practice by which courts strike
down acts of other governmental entitiesand it led to such epoch-making
Supreme Court judgments as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ended
the legal racial segregation of public schools, and United States v. Nixon
(1974), in which the Court ordered Pres­ident Richard Nixon to turn over
certain potentially relevant audiotapes to the Watergate court. It also gave
the nation Roe v. Wade (1973). Judicial review is American constitutionalisms
greatest gift to the worldan arguably greater gift than the U.S. constitutional
model itself. Unlike many other features of the new American government, the
practice was virtually without precedent when the Supreme Court announced
it in Marbury v. Madison (1803). An English case in 1610 had intimated that
an act of Parliament against common right and reason was void
under the common law, and the English Privy Council was later empowered to
invalidate colonial statutes that ran counter to the colonial charters or
English law. But nowhere in the world before 1803 did the courts of any country
engage in the practice of striking down laws inconsistent with the national
constitution.

William Marbury (17621835), a prominent Maryland land speculator who
sued the U.S. government to claim a job as a federal justice of the peace,
was only a bit player in the high drama to which he gave his name. Two larger
figuresThomas Jefferson (17431826), the third president of the
United States, and John Marshall (17551835), who was chief justice of
the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835dominated the stage....